Best 335 quotes in «sympathy quotes» category

A truly compassionate man gives a poor woman a portion of his meal before he eats, not after he has eaten.

Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making poster boards filled with photos of the dear departed. But now I know why we do those things. It's busywork, all of it. I had so much to take care of, so many arrangements to make, so many people to inform, I didn't have a moment to be engulfed by the ocean of grief that was lapping at my heels. Instead, I waded through the shallows, performing task after task, grateful to have duties to propel me forward.

Before you cut down the tree, think of the birds that take refuge on it

Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal—the temptation to boast about the execution was huge.

Being a victim is supposed to set you free; it acquits you of any agency, any sense of responsibility to the person who did you harm. It's not your fault, they say. Leave him, they say. Nobody ever tells you what to do if leaving isn't an option. They just call you stupid. A dumb bitch. Sympathy is only meted out if you follow all of society's rules for how a victim is supposed to behave.

Be the person you needed when you needed help.

Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is the servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is the son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wisemen ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wise and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn pages. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers in our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the valley named the shadow, he is not afraid to enter; he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by, we shall meet again"; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light.

By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.

But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don't let myself sympathise—I think it would be wrong.

But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then.

But it is difficult to tell whether something is an oppurtunity or a trap when you are put on the spot.

But you'd hope anyone would feel sympathy if they actually saw someone face to face, pleading for a chance.

Dislike is much easier to handle than sympathy.

Comfort came in and stood with an appearance of guilt and shame. Her head bent, her eyes soaked with tears, her hands and legs, vibrating like a guiter string as perspiration covered her entire body, she felt like disappearing into the thin air, maybe to another mind creating world.

Compassion, kindness, empathy, sympathy, mercy, and understanding are six connected values that ‎should be implanted in the young generation, as they are what motivates people to help and stand ‎for each other. A heart that is filled with mercifulness is a heart that will help its society and the whole ‎world to continue, improve, and thrive.‎

Empathy heals shame; sympathy exacerbates shame. We don't want people to feel sorry for us; we want people to be with us.

Don't cry for the dead, for the dead is deaf, dumb, blind, lame, unemotional and dead.

Don’t mourn over the past; it has no pity for you. Don’t cry over the present, it has no sympathy for you, and I don’t weep the future, it has no mercy on you.

Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer.

empathy is more powerful than sympathy

For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.

Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.

Feeling leads to understanding, understanding leads to sympathizing, sympathizing leads to action, and with action, we can change the world. - Maya Dehlin

FIGARO. The guiltiest have the hardest hearts. ’Twas ever thus.

Every single good person is a good person for their own sake, not for the sake of humanity, not even for the sake of another human being.

Feeling sorry for our bodies ought to be the closest we get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

George's hand lifted and fell away again. It seemed an insult to imply that anything so small as a touch could stop the raw feeling in Sir Stephen's suddenly dark and haunted eyes.

Government is not moved by sympathy. It is moved by ingenuity.

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

He kept telling and I kept repeating “I Know” sometimes people doesn’t need answers, they just need you to hear them what they say, make them that they are heard, Vijay was like that, he doesn’t need any one sympathizing to him, he just needed people to listen to him.

Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?' I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.

He felt that if he could get deep down in himself quickly enough, he would be okay, but sympathy might drive him mad.

I bask in that sympathy because it's nice to have somebody who cares, even if it's the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a sharing of their problems - the way they had always.. because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

I also found it hard to accept the Mizuko I'd known in multiple miniatures was one physical person. I suppose it would feel the same waking up in bed with Jesus or Father Christmas, or any long-dead figurehead of an ancient cult. You know every word of every doctrine off by heart and then you see their toenails, gums, and vertebrae, not in pieces but all held together, and it's hard not to lose your shit.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais—the kind Greek husbands are slain in.

I became convinced that I was being watched. Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.

I can feel for anyone that is unjustly treated...and I can feel for those that injure them too.

I cannot live my life striving only for my own security, I can only feel secure when I see myself useful in other people's life.

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it.

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.

I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another.

I can’t hate him. All I feel is sympathy for the devil who has crawled inside my heart, stealing my soul and my will from me.

I can’t look people in the eye and tell them that they’re going to die anymore.